SF Startup Launches Eyes in the Sky

Engineers from startup Planet Labs huddled over pancakes and mimosas Thursday morning, staring at a projector screen in their San Francisco office as their “doves” took flight. The doves, as they are known to Planet Labs employees, are 28 small satellites stuffed in the cargo section of a rocket taking off from a NASA base in Virginia.

The launch of the satellites, each slightly bigger than a rolled-up movie poster, is the culmination of Planet Labs’ three-year effort to build the world’s largest privately owned fleet of earth-imaging satellites. After they are released from the International Space Station in the coming weeks, the satellites will orbit the earth at an altitude of 400 kilometers – about 249 miles – constantly taking pictures of the entire planet.

This year promises to be a big one for the burgeoning microsatellite industry. Thanks to technological innovations that have enabled satellites to be built smaller and cheaper, a handful of startups is entering this new space race with an eye towards new commercial uses for satellite imagery.

In addition to Planet Labs, two other earth-imaging startups have recently emerged from stealth mode: UrtheCast, which plans to stream video from the Russian section of the International Space Station; and Skybox, which launched a single, high-resolution imaging satellite in November. The companies have backing from some top venture capitalists, including the Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner and Khosla Ventures in Silicon Valley.

If building satellites and getting them into orbit aren’t hard enough, each company also faces the challenge of developing a business model to sell these images.

The companies say there’s no shortage of potential clients: mining companies that now rely on planes to check mine conditions; scientists that monitor the movement of rivers; insurance companies and commodity traders who track crops; tropical countries seeking to measure deforestation; and businesses that want to spy on clients or competitors – to see, for example, how many cars are in a retailer’s parking lot to infer sales volumes.

Unlike its larger competitors, Planet Labs also sees a market for its images among everyday consumers, such as a property owner who wants to check on the status of a vacation home. Its low costs and frequent updates could also appeal to nonprofit organizations that could use the images to monitor social unrest.

Today, high-resolution satellite imagery isn’t available for these kinds of routine uses; their images are just too expensive. While lower-resolution photos are available from services like Google Earth and Google Maps, their images are often several years old.

Planet Labs says the company already has more than $13 million in contracts to sell images from the satellites in Thursday’s launch. But the buyers are scientists and others accustomed to handling raw satellite imagery. In order to tap the broader market potential, Planet Labs Chief Technology Officer Chris Boshuizen says, the company has to figure out a pricing model and a way to deliver imagery as a useful product.

For example, counting cars in a parking lot requires not just images, but big-data analytics: software programs that can tell the difference between a car and a tree, instantly count the number of vehicles, identify patterns and track them over time.

“Some of them will say, ‘Give us a hard drive,’ because they have the in-house ability to do their own analysis,” Boshuizen says. “Others just want answers.”

Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Chris Boshuizen is Planet Labs’ CEO.